State Sen. John Kefalas, a Democrat from Fort Collins, sponsored the bill to modernize the state's open records law for a second straight year. The measure, which requires taxpayer-funded agencies to release documents in their digital form, if one exists, was unanimously accepted by the Senate after being passed through the House on Wednesday.

Proponents say the bill will drag the paper document-focused Colorado Open Records Act into the reality of how public information is kept in the 21st century. It's the first major update to open records law in decades.

Kefalas' bill was one of the first introduced this session and was the product of months of stakeholder meetings with government and higher education representatives, open government advocates and members of the press, including Coloradoan Executive Editor Lauren Gustus.

"This is a good day for open and transparent government," Kefalas said in a text message. "Due to a lot of hard work, we've succeeded in modernizing CORA by making public records available in digital, searchable and sortable formats. I'm delighted that SB-40 passed the Senate unanimously."

Jeff Roberts, executive director of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition, said the bill that passed appears to create "meaningful change" in how the state's open records law works.

"You've got to measure it by what happened to you," he said, referring to the Coloradoan's request of digital pay records from Colorado State University and subsequent denial because a physical copy of the 4,000-employee record is kept in a library on campus. "I don't think this would allow Colorado State University to point you toward a 145-page printed database and say, 'Here you go.'"

Multiple public entities expressed concern with the bill. A University of Colorado lawyer argued it could cost his university millions of dollars and add onerous disclosure requirements to the university's workload.

Advocates for smaller government entities worried employees wouldn't have the technical know-how to protect private information exempt from release to the public. Utilities warned the change could make their infrastructure more vulnerable to terrorism.

At the end of the day, some of those who cast a more critical eye at the proposal were satisfied with the result. Jeremy Hueth, the CU lawyer, went as far as saying the process behind the bill — from the between-session stakeholder meetings to the ongoing conversations and edits to the bill — helped restore some faith in typically intensive legislative sessions. He said everyone involved, including record custodians concerned with the initial scope, was invested in modernizing open records law.

The end result is "clear, it's fair and everyone understands it and we can work with it without resorting to litigation," he said.

Senate Republicans also sought to add a provision that would have made the judicial branch of the state government subject to this open records law; currently, the judicial branch of government has its own rules governing open records.

While many of those amendments were eventually stripped out, an amendment providing extra protection to infrastructure survived the final House and Senate votes.

The amendment allows public agencies to withhold records that "would be useful to a person in planning an attack" beyond providing the location of the infrastructure.

"I know what they're trying to do, they're trying to get at terrorists that could use information in a nefarious way," Roberts said. "I don't know if this could broadly be used to deny records that you could currently get. I think we'll have to see how this one plays out."

Kefalas first ran a bill aiming to make digitally held records available in their native format in the 2016 legislative session, where it stalled in committee. He proposed the 2016 bill after reading a column in the Coloradoan by First Amendment lawyer Steve Zansberg about the news organization's efforts to get digital copies of the CSU salary increase exercise, following concerns about unequal pay practices for men and women.

After the Coloradoan's records request was denied, the news organization recreated the almost 145-page printed database line by line in an effort to better understand how the university decided which university employees received raises.

"Government records belong to the people, and therefore, we should be making those records as easy as possible for the public to access and analyze," Kefalas said in a statement following the bill's passage Wednesday.

CSU was likewise satisfied with the result, according to spokesperson Mike Hooker.

"CSU, as a supporter of public transparency, is pleased that the changes in the bill's final form, which were requested by a broad coalition of public entities to address persistent problems in the original legislation, resolved our concerns with the unintended consequences contained in the original draft," Hooker wrote in an email.

The bill must be signed by the governor to become law. Its effective date will be Aug. 9, 2017.